Education 

Ph.D., English, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2010
B.A., English, The Ohio State University, 1999

Specialization 

Computational and quantitative research methods
Language and geopolitics
Language policy
Digital humanities
Literature

Honorary Positions

Peter and Bonnie McCausland Faculty Fellow, 2020-2022
College of Arts and Sciences Innovative Teaching Associate, 2020-2022

Recent Courses 

CYBR 390: Texts as Data for Global Communications
LING 405: Language and AI
SCHC 383: Mathematics for Shakespeare
ENGL 490: Literature and AI
ENGL 382: The Enlightenment
ENGL 288: English Literature
ENGL 282: Literature and Ethnic Conflict
ENGL 102: Researching and Writing About Language and Human Rights

Current Research Projects 

I work simultaneously in several distinct research fields.

One strand of my current research examines the relationship between language and political conflict. I am co-editor, with Stan Dubinsky and Harvey Starr, of the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Language and Political Conflict (Cambridge University Press, November 2026), an interdisciplinary volume that brings together scholars from across the social sciences and humanities to address language as a central dimension of political life. Further, I am pursuing two related strands of research: one focused on language rights and public policy, including the development of comparative measures of linguistic rights, and another focused on the political consequences of linguistic difference, especially the ways relations among languages can shape collective identity, social boundaries, and conflict.

A second strand of research involves language and artificial intelligence. Building on my work in computational humanities, including my book Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies (Stanford University Press, 2023), I have published a series of articles on topics such as distant reading, distributional semantics, historical social networks, and geospatial text analysis. My current in-progress monograph, New Genealogies of Meaning: Literary Theory After Gen AI, asks what the success of large language models can teach us about language, textuality, and meaning. Rather than treating AI primarily as a question of cognition or simulation, the project uses generative systems as an occasion to revisit major concepts from literary theory and to reconsider how meaning emerges from the accumulated textual record of human communication.

I also continue to collaborate with Eric Gidal (University of Iowa), on a line of research at the intersection of literary studies, geography, and environmental media. Our articles have explored topics including geospatial semantics, infrastructural networks, Scottish space, and the historical forms through which texts encode and organize geographic knowledge. That work now culminates in a book project, Textual Ecologies: Media, Information, and Human Geography, which traces a long history of geoinformation from the eighteenth century to the present. We argue that modern spatial knowledge emerges through linked textual, visual, and computational forms, and we combine archival research with geospatial text analysis, GIS, and agent-based modeling to show how books, diagrams, and data systems have helped shape the ways human communities understand and inhabit environmental space.

Recent and Ongoing Publications 

Books
   • The Cambridge Handbook of Language and Political Conflict, ed. Stanley Dubinsky, Michael Gavin, and Harvey Starr (Cambridge University Press, in press and expected 2026).
   • Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies (Stanford University Press, 2023).
   • The Invention of English Criticism, 1650 - 1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Articles
   •  Michael Gavin and Eric Gidal, “Sir John Sinclair and the Origins of Geoinformatics.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (forthcoming).
   • Eric Gidal and Michael Gavin, “Ian McHarg’s Book of Nature.” Leonardo (forthcoming).
   • Michael Gavin and Michael Witmore, “The Semantic Space of Good and Evil: A Computational Study of Moral Contrasts.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (November 2025). https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqaf127.
   • Michael Gavin, Gareth Rees-White, Shana Scucchi, Harvey Starr, and Stanley Dubinsky. “The Language Freedom Index: A Metric for Policy Evaluation.” Language 101, no. 2 (2025): e84-e108.
   • “Why Distant Reading Works,” New Literary History 53, 4 / 54, 1 (2022 / 2023): 613-633.
   • Michael Gavin and Eric Gidal, “The Conceptual Structure of Ossianic Space,” Literary Geographies 9, 1 (2023): 161-84.
   • “Literatures of the New Realism: Anil’s Ghost, Half of a Yellow Sun, and the Problem of Ethnic Conflict,” Intertexts 25, 1-2 (2021): 27-62.
   • Eric Gidal and Michael Gavin, “Infrastructural Semantics: Postal Networks and Statistical Accounts in Scotland, 1790-1845.”  International Journal of Geographical Information Science (2019). DOI: 10.1080/13658816.2019.1631454.
   • “How to Think about EEBO,” Textual Cultures 11, 1-2 (2017 [2019]): 70-105.
   • Rachel Mann and Michael Gavin, “Distant Reading the Body, 1640-1700,” Review of English Studies (January 2019): 1-21.
   • “Vector Semantics, William Empson, and the Study of Ambiguity,” Critical Inquiry 44 (Summer 2018): 641-73.
   • “An Agent-based Computational Approach to the ‘Adam Smith Problem’,” Historical Social Research 41, 1 (2018): 308-36.
   • Michael Gavin and Eric Gidal, “Scotland’s Poetics of Space: An Experiment in Geospatial Semantics,” Journal of Cultural Analytics (November, 2017) doi:10.22148/16.017.
   • “Historical Text Networks: The Sociology of Early English Criticism,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 50, 1 (Fall 2016): 53-80.
   • “Agent-Based Modeling and Historical Simulation,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 8, 4 (2014).
   • “Real Robinson Crusoe,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 25, 2 (Winter 2012-13): 301-25.
   • “Writing Print Cultures Past: Literary Criticism and Book History,” Book History 15 (2012): 26-47.
   • “Critics and Criticism in the Poetry of Anne Finch,” ELH 78, 3 (Fall 2011): 633-55.
   • “James Boswell and the Uses of Criticism,” SEL 50, 3 (Summer 2010): 665-81.

Book Chapters
   •  “Words as Data in Political Science and Corpus Linguistics,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Language and Political Conflict, ed. Stanley Dubinsky, Michael Gavin, and Harvey Starr (Cambridge University Press, in press and expected 2026).
   •  Michael Gavin, Harvey Starr, and Stanley Dubinsky, “Language and the Study of Political Conflict,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Language and Political Conflict, ed. Stanley Dubinsky, Michael Gavin, and Harvey Starr (Cambridge University Press, in press and expected 2026).
   •  Stanley Dubinsky, Michael Gavin, A. J. Murphy, and Harvey Starr, “Linguistic and Territorial Integrity in the Ukraine-Russia Conflict,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Language and Political Conflict, ed. Stanley Dubinsky, Michael Gavin, and Harvey Starr (Cambridge University Press, in press and expected 2026).
   •  Stanley Dubinsky, A. J. Murphy, and Michael Gavin, “Understanding Linguistic Difference: Key Concepts for the Study of Language Conflict,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Language and Political Conflict, ed. Stanley Dubinsky, Michael Gavin, and Harvey Starr (Cambridge University Press, in press and expected 2026).
   •  Jeanne Britton, Michael Gavin, Zoe Langer, and Jason Porter, “The Digital Piranesi,” in Piranesi@300: Studi nel Terzo Centenario della Nascita (1720-2020), ed. Clare Hornsby and Mario Bevilacqua (Rome: Editoriale Artemide, 2023), 276-306.
   •  Michael Gavin, Collin Jennings, Lauren Kersey, and Brad Pasanek, “Spaces of Meaning: Vector Semantics, Conceptual History, and Close Reading,” in Debates in Digital Humanities 2019, ed. Matthew K. Gold and Lauren F. Klein (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 243-67.